Well, instead of waiting for tech support to get back to me, I took it upon myself to borrow a laptop and played out and finished <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/beyond.gif" alt="" />
Some thoughts for the next version (what I called "The Reckoning").
Spell Effects - There needs to be some way of knowing what spell is affecting the characters. When my characters walked through a green mist (some area spell cast by an enemy) I lost quite a bit of strength, making my armor, weapons, etc useless. Everquest has icons that stack along the top of the screen (well they used to, now it's a floating window that you can move anywhere) that shows buff spells, enemy cast negative spells, etc.
Item Acquired - My character had an incredible amount of items in his inventory. When I "acquired an item".. I had NO IDEA what it was!
Looting - "Take All" button?
- Encumbered. Please explain your system to me before I rant about how it's broken. 1200/2345 doesn't look like I'm encumbered. And for some reason, removing an identical item, wouldn't remove the encumberance!
- "Gather All" button? A command for the character to gather all items laying around a certain vicinity?
Moving Items - The "move item" feature is annoying, because any number of times I tried to pick up loot, the game assumed I was trying to MOVE it, not PICK IT UP. Pretty aggrivating. Perhaps SHIFT+LCLICK would make more sense?
Enemy A.I. - I appreciate the whole "attack, flee, attack" approach for certain enemies (Shadow Creature, Skeleton Mage, etc). But come on. I spent time chasing them across an entire map before catching them. It's hard to understand the A.I. doing that.. while the A.I. doesn't tell the creatures to flee when they reach 10% health. They keep fighting.. and I never see them drink any potions.. although there were some that were healing themselves, but by that time... DEATH BLOW! and they expired.
General Comments - Overall, great experience. I was a little leary of the major changes in the architecture of the game. It's a tad frustrating that now.. I have to stumble across trainers to get the skills to even put points into my character!
Inventory system.. gah, I appreciate being able to carry anything, but man, what a mess. ORGANIZE BUTTON. PLEASE! I'm sure the method you've adopted allows us to put anything into inventory, but it's just difficult to deal with.
<span class='standouttext'>Spoiler : </span><span class='spoiler'>Funny, but my wizard wasn't really a wizard until the final act. He was more a ranger than anything (plinking away with a bow). The wizard/shaman trainers were far and few inbetween. I think in Act 2 or 3 I finally got spikes and then I found the hammer? spell.
I took out the end boss with level 4 hammer. Over and over til he... walked off and told me there's another game coming with him in it. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />
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